Weddingbee Blog

Last we left off on the calligraphy front, I told you about BM Lauren’s generous offer to do all our calligraphy. I also mentioned that I’d be taking a little road trip to LA to visit her and do calligraphy together. Well, it didn’t happen. Basically I had a “OMG-I-should-be studying-for-the-Bar-exam,-not-driving-to-LA-and-back” freak out and canceled. Lauren is a doll and was totally understanding about it, but I still wanted to help with the calligraphy, and to get our out-of-state and international invites out by mid-June. So I took it upon myself to calligraphy about half our envelopes, doing 10-20 per day (which believe me, was a welcome break from BarBri).

Instead of following through on my original plans to learn fancy Copperplate calligraphy (which involves an elbow nib and a bottle of ink!), I cheated and used one of those calligraphy fountain pens (much like this one). I actually found this pen, which I must have gotten sometime in middle school, in a box at my parents’ house. Luckily, there was one unopened ink cartridge with it! I was ecstatic to see how well it worked. While at my parents’ house, I also came across this:

A World of Disney Light Up Drawing Desk. My art teacher gave this to me in high school, but it was vintage even back then. I plugged it in, and couldn’t believe that the bulb still worked! This would be the perfect tool to make my calligraphy come out nice and straight on the envelopes! Here’s how Mickey helped with my calligraphy:

I used a ruler to draw lines onto a piece of paper, and slid the paper in each envelope. The envelope paper is pretty thick, so this is where the light box came in handy!

I placed each envelope on the light box - you can see the lines through pretty well now. Then I wrote out my own version of calligraphy - basically just a fancier version of my own handwriting.

The finished product: straight addresses and no pencil lines to erase! Score!

And with that, I feel totally justified about my inability to ever throw anything away! Who knew that an old calligraphy pen and a vintage light box would help me with my wedding invitations?

Have you found new uses for old things during the wedding planning process?